1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the present invention generally relate to multimodal mobile phones, and particularly to automatically selecting an operating mode of the mobile phone to lower the cost of a data plan usage used by the mobile phone.
2. Description of Related Art
A softphone is a software program for making voice or video telephone calls over the Internet using a general purpose computer, rather than using dedicated hardware. Such a software program may be referred to as a softclient. Often, a softphone is designed to behave like a traditional telephone, sometimes appearing as an image of a phone, with a display panel and buttons with which the user can interact. Often, a softphone runs on a mobile platform handling telephone calls through the IP network provided by the Wi-Fi or the cellular data network such as a 3G/4G/4GLTE data link, and so forth.
Calls transported over a traditional cellular telephone network may be subject to usage limits or pricing plans that are different from usage limits or pricing plans of a data communication connection. For example, a voice call transported as a traditional cellular call may be subject to a limit on a monthly amount of minutes used, but may not have a separate limit on data usage. On the other hand, a communication session transported by a data communication connection may have an overall limit on the quantity of data (e.g., a limit on the number of gigabytes per month), but no specific limit on the number of minutes used.
A softphone may be configured to transport voice calls or video telephone calls by default over a data communication connection. However, if a user makes many such calls or exceptionally long calls, the user may exceed their usage limit for a data communication connection, or may enter a more expensive pricing regime, even though the user's usage limit using the traditional cellular telephone network has not been exceeded or may be in a lower pricing regime. Such imbalanced usage incurs extra cost for a user.
Some cellular service providers may provide alerts if a user's plan use is high and/or close to the monthly allowance. By the time a user receives such a notice, it may be too late to make all remaining calls for the billing period as regular cell phone calls. Or, the user may need to pay for certain calls over a data communication connection if it uses features that are unavailable as ordinary cell phone calls.
Accordingly, systems and a method are needed in order to overcome existing challenges and to reduce the cost of mobile phone usage. A softphone running on a mobile phone, providing VoIP and video/IP services should be able to select from among available operating modes in order to reduce costs.